The Next Move: Building Power with Doran Schrantz

Season 2, Episode 4

At the end of the day, the issue is power. It's not healthcare, housing or climate. It’s power. And to win on the issues, the fundamental thing we got to change is who has it. People power, money power, political power, and cultural power.

For more than two decades Doran Schrantz has been squarely focused on the project of building power with lots of other people through organizing. She dedicated a huge chunk of her life to doing this with one organization, ISAIAH, a Minnesota faith-based organization that she directs. She also leads Faith in Minnesota, a political home for people of faith in the state.

Here are some of my favorite and inspiring quotes from our conversation:

On Her Inquiry Into Power

I know what it feels like to not have power. I know what it feels like to be lost. I want to learn what it feels like to reclaim my agency in life. And that has something to do with power. And it has something to do with the way I relate to other people.

When You Realize You Can Change Things

There are some building blocks about how a human who has experienced powerlessness comes into relationship with that, and crosses a bridge into a path of becoming more agentic. [To decide,] “I want to change this and I can”, that's a giant thing. That's a giant thing to decide is possible. It's like an act of faith. It's a journey. It's scary. It's exhilarating. It's all those things.

Moving from Private Pain To Public Action

A huge part of what gets people to the place where they might want to cross that bridge to become public or do something in the world or be a leader as we say in our lexicon is connecting their story, their private pain that's been made private and going public with it. That it's actually, it's a communal problem. It's not just an individualized problem, which is itself a liberating experience. 

You Open the Door Instead of Walking by it

A lot of what's going to happen is you're going to have somebody asking a lot of “why”. Where do you think that comes from? When did you learn that? You don't skip over the clues that they give you about things that have caused pain. Because people leave breadcrumbs for you.  And you open the door instead of walking by it. 

Overcoming Shame

We need space and time and coaching and people to help us draw those connections and actually overcome shame, overcome fear, overcome insecurity. That's actually where the transformative part—I think—of organizing happens is in that conversation. Over and over and over again—it's not one conversation.

Suspending Judgement

I can't do my job if I'm spending all my time judging other people, right? My job is to organize them, not to judge them or figure out if they're right, or if they agree with me, or you know, if they're good.

What I hear in Doran's story is a constant deepening of her understanding of her path, reflecting on her experience from new angles, and coming back to experiences that have not yet been digested. 

That’s what we do in organizing - help people know their story. Not the story others have written for them. But, people's true story. We do this with person after person, through one-on-ones, training, reflection, and through experiences that we create. 

This requires becoming a more developed version of ourselves. Hungry to understand our own shit and work with it. 

We all do this in different ways: prayer, meditation, therapy, journaling, in relationship with others. 

It doesn’t really matter how, but we need to do the work, or we can only be so helpful to others in doing the same.  

Doran said “my job is to organize people. My job is not to figure out if they agree with me.  My job is not to figure out if they are good. My job is to organize them.  And if my job is to organize new people, I absolutely need to be with the woman with the pineapple tablecloth, because Democracy should live there too.“

Who represents the person with the pineapple tablecloth in each of our lives. To where are each of us taking Democracy that it doesn't already exist?  

You can learn more about the work that Doran is doing with ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota at peoplesaction.org/nextmove.

You can find Doran on Twitter @DSchrantz.

Join the conversation and listen to this great episode with Doran Schrantz in its entirety here, or click here for a copy of the full transcript!